Wednesday, December 4, 2013

#CookieChatter: Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

A little while ago, the folks at Land O'Lakes invited me to participate in their #CookieChatter Twitter party, as a representative of the dairy farmers who are members of the Land O'Lakes cooperative.

I agreed to join the party. But I had no idea what to expect. I've had a Twitter handle for a while now, but I rarely tweet. And I had never participated in a Twitter party.

Well, the party was tonight. And it was wild. My head is still spinning.

During the party, I shared the last guest post I did for the Land O'Lakes blog – Baking Memories Together: Our Holiday Traditions on the Farm. The post includes some tips for baking and decorating cookies with kids – and keeping your sanity. It did not include the recipe for the sugar cookies I make, because I figured just about everyone has a sugar cookie recipe already.

Several requests for the recipe were tweeted during the party, so here's the recipe I got from Glen's mom for Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies. (The raspberry extract was my idea; I use it all the time in place of almond extract.) These roll-out cookies are made with both real butter and cream cheese. They bake up perfectly crisp, yet almost creamy — even without frosting.

Cream together butter, cream cheese and sugar. Beat in egg yolk, salt and extracts. Stir in flour until well blended. Divide dough into six pieces and chill for 8 hours.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

On a well-floured surface, roll one piece of dough out to 1/8 to 1/4 inch thickness. (Keep other pieces refrigerated.) Cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Place 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Leave cookies plain for frosting or sprinkle with colored sugar before baking (press sugar into dough with back of spatula to secure).

Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, until light and golden brown. Cool completely before frosting.

Tips & Tricks(added January 10, 2014)

After my sister made these for the first time and called for advice, I decided I should add a few tips to this recipe.

→ If you're new to rolling out cookie dough, this video from Land O'Lakes is extremely helpful.

→ When you take this dough out of the fridge to roll, it will be rock hard. Either take it out 5 to 10 minutes before you start to roll or squeeze the dough gently in your hands (while still wrapped) to warm it up before rolling.

→ Use a generous amount of flour on your rolling surface and your rolling pin.

→ Lots of rolled cookies recipes will recommend re-rolling dough only once (so will the video above), but I re-roll this dough until it's all cut into cookies. There might be a slight difference between the first rolled cookies and the re-rolls, but it's insignificant.

→ The number of cookies this recipe makes varies considerably depending upon how thick you roll the dough and what size cookie cutters you use.

→ I think these cookies are best when the dough is rolled out to 3/16 of an inch, but since I started using an adjustable rolling pin to roll my dough, I roll this cookie dough out to 1/4 of an inch – but only because my rolling pin doesn't have an option for 3/16 inch. They turn out great at either thickness.